Kununarra

On Monday I drove from Katherine to Kununarra. There are only a couple of small towns along the way, but there is Gregory National Park on the Victoria River, which looked like it could be worth a visit. Apparently Victoria River is good for Barramundi fishing. 

Not long before Kununarra the road crosses the border into Western Australia, and I was surprised to see that there is an actually manned boarder post where you have to stop. A young lady in uniform wanted to know about my fruit and vegetables and had a little rummage through my esky (cooler box in American). Kindly she also told me that I had to set my clock back an hour and a half. Western Australia maintains the same time zone across the whole state, regardless how far east you are, so here in Kununarra it gets light just after 4 AM and the sun sets just after 5 PM. 

So the next morning I got up at 4.30, had my Weetbix and set out to explore the area around Kununarra. My plan was to drive to Wyndham, which apparently is WA's northernmost town, along the old road, which starts at Kununarra at the Ord River Crossing. When I got to the river crossing it was closed and by the way it was blocked it looks like it is closed on a permanent basis.

A subtle hint that the crossing is closed

I drove back to the main road and headed along it towards Wyndham, until I came to a sign that read Grotto Road. Intrigued I followed this side road up a hill and came to a car park from which a narrow path leads towards The Grotto, which is a waterfall and a waterhole in a tight gorge. The track led down the cliff on some man made steps and it was only about a 5 minute walk to the bottom. There was no water flowing, but still plenty of water in the pool, which, according to a sign in the car park, is 300 ft deep. It looked like a great place to bring a family and hang out for a picnic day and a swim, just heed the signs along the way.

No kidding...

The pool at the bottom of the grotto

On the way out of the gorge I saw some black cockatoos and some wallabies. I guess the also like to hang around a permanent water source. 

On the drive into Wyndham I came across a lot of road trains, more than on any other part of my journey. As I learned soon after, this is because Wyndham has a deep water port, from which they ship iron ore into Asia. I drove up to Five Rivers Lookout above the town, from where you get a good view of the port. Unfortunately there was a lot of heat haze, which meant that I could only see a couple of the five rivers that merge into the gulf here. Nonetheless the view was stunning and there was a bit of a breeze, which made it very pleasant to just sit and watch. For my entertainment they sent in the iron ore ship, which according to a local council worker, who came over for a chat, doesn't happen that often any more because of the low commodity prices. Sitting hight up on the lookout, watching the whole operation of unloading the trucks, loading the barges that take it to the ship felt a bit like playing with a miniature toy set

The ore on its way to the port

The ship that picks up the ore

All like a miniature toy set

After an hour or so on the lookout I headed back out of town towards a road sign that I spotted on the way in that said "Prisoner Boab 25 km". It was the turnoff to King River road, which was marked as 4WD only on my tourist brochure, so I figured I might as well have a go. As a matter of fact, there wasn't any need to ever engage 4WD, but it was a very corrugated dirt road with some sharp rocks along the way. 

King River Road across Wyndham flood plains

After about 20 minutes there was a sign up a side track that just said "Aboriginal Art". A little way along there was another sign pointing to a rock ledge. I parked up and climbed up the rocks onto the ledge and, after startling dozens of birds who roosted in small caves, saw the aboriginal art. Some of it was very faint and some of it a lot clearer. I suppose it must have been painted at different times.

Rock art along King River Road

Further along King River Road I finally reached the Prisoner Boab. Boabs are a tree that stores water in its trunk. They are very hard to date because they don't have year rings like other trees, so they require carbon dating. Anyway, this particular tree had a huge empty belly into which someone cut a door. I have since read that this was done by policemen taking prisoners to court in Wyndham in the late 19th century. They used the hollow tree as a lock-up for prisoners while they camped overnight.

Prison Boab near Wyndham

Unfortunately I kept my camera in one of my cup holders in the car and my water bottle in the other, so when the bottle leaked on the way back my camera got a drenching and I can't bring you any more pictures from that day. Luckily, once it dried out overnight, it came back to life the next morning. Anyway, the rest of the first day I spent looking at a variety of dried out waterfalls and springs, none really worth talking about, other than that I really got to do some four wheel driving to one of them where the track was a mix of big rocks and deep sand. I am glad to report that my car was up to it without getting bogged once.

On my second day in Kununarra I went on a boat cruise up Lake Kununarra to the Lake Argyle Dam. Being around water is really what this area is all about, but all the trips and activities are so expensive that I could only afford one day of it on my budget.

The cruise went 55 km up the lake and back, covering 110 km in total, so you can imagine the boat was reasonably fast, but we did stop at regular intervals to look at wildlife and at one point we got a very interesting lecture on the history and the workings of the Kununarra irrigation scheme. The scheme started in the sixties with the blocking of the Ord River at Kununarra and the forming of Lake Kununarra. This dam had to be built so that it could be fully opened in the wet season to let the huge floods of the river go past. In the dry season it was closed and the water of the lake was pumped out into an irrigation channel. In the seventies they then built the Argyle Dam further up river, which allows them to now regulate the flow into Lake Kununarra all year round and maintain an exact water level that allows the irrigation channel to be gravity fed, rather than with pumps. The old pump house is now a waterfront restaurant. 

Pump House Restaurant Kununarra

It was only in the ninteties that they started using the water in Lake Argyle to produce electricity, so the main intention was always irrigation. Currently there are about 30'000 acres of land under irrigation, but this is being increased as we speak to almost double. The crops include Mango, Melons, Pumpkins, Chick Peas, but by far the largest area produces Sandalwood, which doesn't really do much to solve world hunger (at least we'll all smell nice).

The statistics of Lake Argyle are quite staggering. A 350 meter long dam contains 21 times the volume of Sydney Harbour in fresh water. The surface area is 1000 square kilometres. And what surprised me is that it only took three wet seasons to fill it, which shows what volumes of water fall in just a few months every year. Apparently in the 2011 wet season (the wettest on record) the lake level rose by 1.6 metres in 24 hours.

Lake Argyle Dam

Of course, damming up the river is a major human intervention with nature and it is yet to be seen what the long term consequences will be. in the short term it has lead to a drastic increase in species of flora and fauna, and during our cruise we saw lots of different birds and several crocodiles. Apparently there are only freshwater crocodiles in Lake Kununarra.

Lake Kununarra Bird Life (on the right is an Australian Jabiru, quite rare, apparently)

Our guide was very knowledgeable and I learned a lot of new things. For example I always thought that the birds sat there with their wings spread to cool down. but as a matter of fact they are drying out their feathers. They are birds that dive for fish and need to be very agile under water. This means that they can't have oiled feathers, like a duck for example, because that would give them too much buoyancy. So the longer they are under water the more saturated their wings get and hence they have to dry them out afterwards.

Drying out

On the crocodile front I always wanted to know why freshwater crocs are harmless, because they do have fearsome teeth and we saw some that were almost 3 metres long. The answer is that they jaw structure doesn't allow them to chew or rip food apart, they can only eat small animals that they can grab in one hit. As a result we are simply too large for them to attack us and they are actually rather timid. Still, I wouldn't want to go and give one a bit of a cuddle.

Long narrow jaw of a freshwater crocodile

Sunning to get the blood to 32 degrees Mouth open to cool down the brain.

On the way back the sun was setting on the hills, which made all the colours stand out a lot more. The green reed was almost fluorescent and the red rocks were glowing in the shallow light. Just before we got back to the starting point we pulled over and watched a large colony of flying foxes starting to stir and head off into the dusk to get their nightly feed of nectar. It was definitely a worthwhile trip despite being a bit costly.

The sun sets on Lake Kununarra

Next I am off to Halls Creek to visit an old mate from my snow making days in Thredbo, who now works for the bureau of meteorology. It will be great to catch up and learn about his new life up here.